Call for Papers: Special issue on Imagining Punjab and the Punjabi Diaspora

A Special Issue of South Asian Diaspora will be published in 2014 on: ‘Imagining Punjab and the Punjabi Diaspora’

Guest Editor: Anjali Gera Roy

South Asian Diaspora invites contributions to this Special Issue that will foreground the region within diaspora studies through focusing on Punjab, a land-locked region divided between India and Pakistan in 1947. The special issue will explore the importance of the home village/town/city, language and culture rather than the nation for many Punjabis living in the diasporas as well as for those displaced by the 1947 Partition, and will contribute to broader debates on transnationalism, postnationalism, micronationalism, and
new identity narratives emerging in the twenty first century. Papers will focus on Punjab as an ethno-spatial complex, a social form and a type of consciousness, and will address the ways in which multiple imaginings of Punjab as a site of diasporic nostalgia and longing produce inclusive as well as exclusionary narratives of self, home and community. Drawing on historical and post-colonial understandings of the region across a wide range of locations and disciplines, the papers will explore the importance of Punjab, Punjabi language and Punjabi culture in diasporic imagination, memory, identity, and everyday practices. By investigating the meanings of Punjab and Punjabiyat in the past and the present, the special issue will contribute to understandings of postnational formations within a South Asian context.

All invited and contributed manuscripts to this special issue will be peer reviewed. For guidelines of how to prepare the manuscript, please visit the journal website: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rsad
Manuscripts for the Special Issue should be submitted no later than 31 March 2013. Submission of manuscripts through electronic mail (preferably as MS Word attachment) to Anjali Gera Roy (anjali@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in) is especially encouraged. Alternatively,
please submit three printed copies and an electronic version (MS Word format on a floppydisk or a CD) of the manuscript to: